NANCHANG The women bring flower arrangements to the spacious main hall, where the workmen are still attaching moldings to the walls. A robot vacuum cleaner cleans the floor, the sound of drilling can be heard from the spiral stairs leading downstairs.
The opening concert of the Nanchang Opera House starts in a few hours and it seems that it will not be completely ready by then.
However, the Finnish architect of the house sighs with relief. When Jyri Eskola visited here last time two weeks ago, the view was badly unfinished.
Missing moldings and railings or a public toilet that is not yet functional will not cancel the evening’s program.
– A Chinese miracle happened. When the opening date was locked, it had to be done. Now we are in the finished building, Eskola, head of the China office of PES-Arkitehdit Oy, is happy.
In the video below, Eskola’s colleagues Jarkko Salminen and Tuomas Silvennoinen tell about the size of the building and the way the Chinese talked about building a cultural house.
Finns won the design competition
The Finnish architectural firm PES has been operating in China since 2005. It has been successful in China’s large market, especially in cultural construction.
Before Nanchang, PES planned cultural and art centers in Fuzhou and Nanjing. A submarine museum designed by the office is currently being built in Shanghai.
The projects have come through architectural competitions.
Nanchang, a city of 6.5 million in southeastern China, held a competition for a new opera house in 2020.
The design work had to be done remotely during the corona isolation. The working hours were increased by the fact that the customers wanted to discuss a lot about even the smallest details of the building.
Chief architect of PES Tuomas Silvennoinen according to it is typical in China.
– In China, many things are surprising, but behind them there is always a certain kind of understanding of the poetry of buildings, says Silvennoinen.
– We have had long discussions about the story of the house. What does it convey, why is it the way it is. The discussion started already in the competition phase, and it has continued throughout the project.
A combination of Finnish and Chinese
The Chinese developers have not disclosed the price of the Nanchang Opera House. Estimates range between 70 and 90 million euros.
The price is more or less in the same category as Turku’s music hall Fuuga, which is scheduled to be completed in 2026. PES architects have also designed it.
There are similarities in the exteriors and interior design of the houses. The biggest difference is in size: the Nanchang building is 45,000 square meters, or about three times larger than Fuuga.
– In China, because of the lower cost level, it is possible to do things that cannot be done in Europe, CEO of PES Jarkko Salminen says.
According to Salminen, only a few percent of construction in China is of high quality. The Nanchang Opera House can be counted in this category.
The opera house stands out from traditional Chinese cultural buildings with its reduced Finnish architecture.
The Chinese building tradition can be seen in the details of the opera house. The world-famous ceramics of Jiangxi province have been used both in the facades and inside the building. The walls of the hall with 1,600 seats are made of bamboo.
Check out the video below to see what the Chinese audience in Nanchang thought of their experience at the opening:
Construction started just before the recession
The construction and real estate sector is crucial to China’s national economy. It accounts for about a fifth of the country’s gross national product.
The construction industry went into recession three years ago.
In the 2010s, the construction market overheated recklessly. The result was millions of empty new buildings and a wave of bankruptcies of companies in the industry. Evergrande, the largest company in the real estate industry, is trying to get rid of its debts of no less than 300 billion dollars with the help of American law: by filing bankruptcy in the United States, the company reached a debt arrangement that protects it from Chinese creditors.
– We were lucky that construction in Nanchang started before the real estate bubble burst. The opera house had to be completed, says PES chief architect Silvennoinen.
At least in theory, there is a big market for Finnish cultural architecture in China. China has 145 cities with over a million inhabitants, all of which want new concert halls.
However, the construction slump is deep and may have long-lasting effects.
Architect Jyri Eskola thinks it is possible that he will no longer be able to design cultural buildings in China as large as the Nanchang Opera House.
– China is a huge country and there is still a large capacity for growth here, so construction continues. However, in the future, large cultural institutions of this kind will probably not be built as they were in the past, Eskola estimates.